Aku-Aku Eclipse

Easter Island

July 11th, 2010

The path of the total solar eclipse of July 11th, 2010 occurred almost entirely
over the South Pacific Ocean, making landfalls only in Mangaia in the Cook
Islands, Easter Island, and ending in the southern tips of Chile and
Argentina (where the eclipse occurs near sunset, and viewing conditions
are unfavourable). Although Easter Island is one of the most remote
inhabited places on Earth, it is easy to get there, with daily scheduled
airline flights to and from Santiago, Chile, so it became the destination
of choice for Fourmilab's Eclipse 2010 expedition.

All of Easter Island
(Isla de Pascua in Spanish or
Rapa Nui [“Big Island”] in the indigenous
Polynesian language) was within the eclipse track, a bit south of
the centre line. Totality would be almost five minutes on the island,
close to the maximum totality of five minutes and 20 seconds which
would occur in mid-Pacific. The
probability of clear skies
for the eclipse were about fifty-fifty on the island, which were
about as good as anywhere else on the eclipse path. Easter Island weather
is famously variable: “if you don't like the weather, wait fifteen
minutes”, so it's really a matter of luck whether you're
between the clouds when totality occurs. With the island entirely within
the zone of totality, and the weather dominated by the vast surrounding
ocean, not the terrain, choice of observing location had little or nothing
to do with the chance of a clear sky. We opted for a site at Anakena Beach
on the northern tip of the island where we hoped to be able to photograph
the eclipsed Sun above the picturesque
moai
(statues) at that location.
Our only worry was that it might be a mob scene, but that didn't turn out
to be the case: there was a crowd, but plenty of room for everybody to
set up their equipment without interfering with one another.

The eclipse expedition is chronicled in the following photo galleries,
which you're welcome to explore in any order you wish; they are
organised in a more or less chronological fashion, although photos
from sites we visited more than once have in some cases been grouped
together for coherence.
Most of the pictures in these galleries have been tagged with the date
and time they were taken in Universal Time. Santiago is four hours
before Universal Time at this time of year and Easter Island is six
hours earlier.